


Lovestruck

by kototyph



Series: The Family You Choose [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Decidedly Non-Platonic Love, F/M, M/M, Platonic Love, Statutory Rape (I'm looking at you Kate), pre-Season One
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-09 07:44:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/pseuds/kototyph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three times Derek was gobsmacked, and one time it just sort of dawned on him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Peter

**Author's Note:**

> Love, be it romantic or platonic, doesn't often end well for Derek Hale. :'( Also, oops, rating bump for the second chapter.

1.

"Not now, Derek," his mother says, without even turning her head in his direction.

"But, Mom—!"

She sighs, sets her glass down on the table. "Sweetie, why don't you go play outside? That's where Laura is, right?"

He's opening his mouth to say "That's why I came _in_ side!" when the smoky-rich smell of _alpha_ hits his nose, a second before a hand grips his shoulder. He looks up to meet his father's eyes before instinctually ducking his head.

"Why don't you go find your cousins, Der?" the man suggests quietly, lifting his hand to ruffle Derek's hair. "Your mom and I are a little busy right now."

"But..." Derek begins, looking back at her. They're not even _doing_ anything, just sitting at the kitchen table with his aunts, drinking coffee and talking. One of the aunts is smoking, and the acrid scent of tobacco masks the familiar smells of food and family. He wrinkles his nose.

"Derek."

That tone brooks no argument, and Derek keeps his eyes down but drags his feet as he leaves the room, lower lip trembling a little.

Derek _hates_ conclave weekends. Conclaves mean his parents disappearing, aunts invading his house, uncles standing around on the deck, and all his stupid, stupid cousins using his toys and swingset, running all over his yard playing Catch the Rabbit.

Derek is always the rabbit.

It's not that he's the youngest cousin, because Aunt Annie has a pup too little to run and Aunt Caroline's toddlers have just started, but he's the smallest of the 'big kids' and that means whenever all the cousins get together he's the one who ends up omega, last for everything and constantly getting jumped and chewed on.

He obediently goes outside, even though it's a million degrees out. He doesn't see his cousins anywhere, but he's careful anyway, sneaking around low and slow to the south side of the deck. There's a gap in the boards there, and he slips inside, curling up at the far end of the narrow crawlspace and listening to the boards creak and settle as his uncles move over them.

Ernesto, his newest uncle, is talking about his old pack in Mexico. For a long time, Derek listens and draws in the dirt with a finger, imagining running in a forest made of cactuses and sand. It sounds like it would be hard. Their forest is much better, dark and cool, the fallen leaves pooling so deep in some places you can bury yourself in them. He could run in their forest forever, when it's not full of cousins.

"Found him!" someone crows, and before Derek can get away they've got a hand around his ankle and are dragging him back out into the hot sun.

"Let me go!" he shouts, kicking at them, and manages to get free for an instant before they slam him down, pinning him by the neck and grinding his face in the dry, prickly grass.

He shifts, too angry not to, and that just makes them laugh harder. They let him go and he scrambles to his feet, turning to snarl and brace for the next assault.

"Where'd you go, huh?" Matthew, one of the biggest cousins, asks him. He stalks in a circle around Derek, eyes a solid, menacing gold. "Took almost ten whole minutes to find you this time."

"He went into the house," Laura calls from across the yard, jogging towards them. "That's cheating, Der!"

"Shut up," he yells, and swallows against the instinctive fear at challenging her. But he hates her, _hates_ her, her and his stupid cousins, hates them all. "I don't want to play anymore!" The words come out slurred around his fangs.

"Aw, the little rabbit doesn't want to play," someone coos, and they all laugh, Laura and Matthew especially.

"C'mon, I'll give you a minute's head start," Matthew says, stepping forward, and Derek doesn't step back. Doesn't lower his eyes.

Matthew's eyes narrow.

" _I don't wanna play_ ," Derek growls, defiant and scared and a little proud of his own daring. He's going to get beat so bad, but—

But nothing, as it turns out. Matthew is on him in seconds, and his cousin is a _teenager_ , he outweighs Derek twice over, and even shifted Derek is no match for him. Matthew gets him pinned again and just starts punching, lips drawn back over his own fangs as he shifts too. The blows land on Derek's face, on the soft, vulnerable parts of his stomach, and he can taste copper and bile in his mouth, smell Matthew's rage. Laura is yelling at Matthew to stop but the other boy doesn't seem to hear her, and Derek cries and coughs and thinks, _He's going to kill me._

A growl, a _real_ growl, cuts through the cousins like a silver knife and Matthew is suddenly dangling from one arm, twisting and squalling like a wounded polecat.

"Get lost," someone snaps, and tosses him aside. He lands a few feet away and scrambles towards the trees, the other cousins quickly following.

Arms scoop Derek up from the grass and settle him on a hip, and Derek smells pine sap and leather, lemonade on his breath as the man whispers, "Okay, kiddo?"

"U-uncle Peter," he whimpers, wrapping his arms around the man's neck.

"You shouldn't interfere like that, Pete," one of his other uncles calls out from the deck. "Let the pups sort it out between themselves."

"Oh, _fuck_ you," Uncle Peter mutters under his breath, and Derek stares wide-eyed at him, tears forgotten.

"You swore!" he whispers. Uncle Peter smiles, lifts a finger to his lips.

"Shhh, don't tell the alpha."

"I heard that," his father says from the open kitchen window, and Uncle Peter's mouth flattens before twisting into a rueful grin.

"How about this, Derek," his uncle says, starting to walk around the side of the deck towards the stairs into the house. "You and me are going to go clean up, and then we can go down to the tunnels. It's nice and cold down there, and there are some really cool things I know you're going to like."

Derek's eyes go big and round. Only the adults are allowed in the basement tunnels; none of the cousins have ever gotten further than the first landing before.

"Does that sound good?" Uncle Peter asks, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

"Ye—yeah!" Derek nods enthusiastically.

Uncle Peter starts to grin, then purses his lips. He shifts away to put a hand under his shirt, and uses it to wipe at some of the wet on Derek's cheeks. The cloth comes away stained red.

When they pass through the kitchen, his mother looks up and sighs. "Derek, I wish you could just play nicely with the other children," she says as she starts to get to her feet.

Derek shrinks into himself, but Uncle Peter's already saying, "It's fine, Miranda, he's good now. No thanks to your boy, Sherrie."

One of the aunts says, "What can you do? They're pups," and the rest nod in agreement.

"Stopping them from beating each other to death seems like a good first step," his uncle says on a laugh, but his heart is beating fast and under the smell of pine and leather, anger smolders. His arm tightens briefly around Derek, and Derek turns his face into his uncle's shirt and inhales, breathing the scent in. No one else has ever been angry for him. At him, yes, because of him, more times than he can count, but never _for_ him.

Uncle Peters carries him down into the tunnels, and even when he sets Derek on his feet he never once lets go of his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a personal headcanon that Peter is the youngest Hale brother and was often in the same situation as Derek (Official Title: Pack Punching Bag), hence his fixation on being the alpha, etc. As to why Derek's parents display such Grade A child-rearing skills, hopefully that will become clearer in the next chapter.


	2. Kate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains Kate/Derek of the **underage, dubious consent** variety. If either of these things disturb you, consider skipping this part.

_"You understand, don't you?"_

Derek understands.

_"We have to do what's best for the pack."_

He wants what's best for the pack, too.

_"Just... stay there a little longer?"_

He'll stay.

_"It'll work out."_

He doubts it.

_"I love you."_

"Love you too, Dad," he parrots dutifully.

_"We can talk again on the weekend."_

"Okay."

Derek waits until he hears the quiet _click_ that signals the alpha has hung up, and gently replaces the receiver in its cradle. He lets his hand fall, bowing his head to stare blindly at the floor. For a moment, the only noise in the darkened motel room is the faint buzz of the stark florescent bulbs.

"Right," he whispers.

Then rips the phone out of the wall with an inchoate roar.

The plastic casing splinters on impact with the opposite wall, swiftly followed by the chair he's sitting on, the cheap motel toaster, the table, and everything on it. The last creates a shuddering hollow boom that finally satisfies, and Derek stops, panting harshly, hands curled into white-knuckled fists.

He wants to run, _needs_ to run; the unthinking rage that led to all of this in the first place is like a fire at his back, a black dog nipping at his heels and he feels half-crazy, surrounded by the smells of a million different strangers.

And that's the point, really. That's why he's here, on the outskirts of this sleepy little suburban town that just happens to lie right in the middle of the neutral zone between the Redwood and Beacon Hills packs. He can't run. He's not even supposed to leave this room. Matthew's parents are demanding full weregild, eye for an eye, son for a son. If they catch him before the pack comes to a formal agreement, they'll kill him outright.

So Derek waits, still and quiet as he can. He hides, like a hare in tall grass, wrapping himself in human scent and human manners, smiling at the woman at the front desk, joking with her husband, making small talk with the man at the convenience store, who worries about the boy who comes in night after night to buy nothing but soda and Hungry Man frozen dinners.

Underneath, the wolf is constantly raging, stronger now as the moon waxes full in the sky above, and it isn't a choice anymore. Derek has toget _out_.

Slowly, as slowly as he can make himself, he walks across the room, shoving his feet into boots and reaching for his jacket where it hangs on the wall. He wrenches the door open, and twists the hinges so out of joint it refuses to close behind him. He takes several long, deep breaths, and _makes_ it close. It might never open again, but he doesn't care, he _doesn't care,_ not about any of it, and he's going to go feralif he spends one more second—

Deep breaths. The cool, wet scent of autumn fills his head, tainted with human garbage but better than the dense smells of sweat and despair that permeates the grungy room behind him. It's raining, icy needlelike drops that sting as they strike his face, and it's the first bit of luck he's had in days.

His feet move of their own accord, down the steps, into the street and away, body falling into a long easy lope as he works to put as much distance between the motel and himself as possible. As long as he keeps moving, the water will wash away any faint trace he leaves behind, and maybe he'll live to see pack justice passed on his head.

Maybe it will end all the same anyway.

There's a bar, down on a miserable little alley that runs under the highway. It's tiny and rundown and stinks of decades of piss and vomit, but (maybe because of that) he's never smelled another wolf there. Other things, yes; things that itch at his nose, wary-making and confusing, but very definitely not wolves. Not _humans_. And in the small lonely hours of the night, it's comforting to know a place where the stifling press of humanity that surrounds him during the day isn't all-emcompassing.

It helps that they don't card, either.

It's a Wednesday (maybe Thursday by now) and the bar is dark and all but dead, handfuls of patrons grouped in twos and threes talking quietly amongst themselves as the aging jukebox asks someone to pour some sugar on, love. Derek can feel eyes like the prick of knives as he slinks through the door and up to the dimly-lit bar.

He always gets the same thing: a third of raw whiskey, no ice, sloshing around at the bottom of a smudged glass like liquid regret. He doesn't like it, the taste or the burn, but it'd been the first thing that came to mind when the old man behind the counter had asked, "What'll it be?" He's hoping it makes him seem older, but from the look the man gives him every time he orders, the opposite might be true.

That first sip is always the worst, and the liquor burns all the way down to his empty stomach, hits it like napalm and spreads. Slumped low over the bar, he swallows against a cough and takes another sip, gritting his teeth and cutting a glance back out towards the worn felted pool tables, over the dirty, cracked dance floor.

There's a group in the far corner, two men and a woman sitting at a table together. The light falls so that Derek can only see pieces of them, an arm illuminated here, her waterfall of dark blonde hair there. There's something odd about the way they're sitting, facing each other but not talking, all their attention focused outward on the rest of the dark room. Derek wonders vaguely if they're waiting for someone, and lifts his glass again.

He sits, and drinks, but the restlessness that brought him here won't bleed away. He's tired of _waiting_ , of feeling like the ax over his neck might drop at any moment, and the anticipation mixes with that aimless agitation and simmers just under his skin, resentment, anger, confusion, fear. The wolf says, _He challenged. He lost._ The wolf says, _We were dominant._ The wolf says, _We were in the right._

Derek remembers the sudden hot gush of a severed artery in his mouth, remembers almost choking on the blood, and the next sip of whiskey is more of a desperate gulp.

"Going at it a little hard, aren't you?" someone asks, voice low and amused.

It's the woman from the corner, hair curling artlessly over her shoulders, eyes half-lidded, mouth crooked into a small smile. Closer, there's something familiar about her face, like he may have seen her around. Maybe she's been in here before.

He'd remember this scent, though. She smells... there's something smooth and warm and ready, coming off of her in waves. Derek can't help but part his lips, inhale so some of that heavy ripeness rolls across his tongue. Inside, the wolf pricks its ears.

She's watching him like she expects an answer, and under her waiting gaze he manages a stumbling, "I don't— know?"

"You don't know," she repeats, eyebrow raised. "Honey, that's just sad."

He scowls and looks away, but she's already falling into his space, sliding onto the stool next to him and leaning companionably against his shoulder. It's hard to breathe around how inviting she smells, and Derek tenses, acutely aware of every point of contact between them.

"Don't look so mad, kid," she husks, rum and cigarette smoke on her breath. "You don't know, that's fine. Maybe I can help with that."

Her name is Kate, and she drinks whiskey like a man twice her height and three times her weight. Normally Derek does as well or better, but he finds himself moving strangely slow and clumsy in comparison to her quick gestures and cutting words.

"My brothers and I, we were meeting some business partners here in town," she says, four or five glasses in. "Nothing but work, work, work, for _weeks,_ Derek. I'm ready for a little fun."

She's running a finger down his arm, lopsided smile gone wide and a little wicked, and he doesn't remember telling her his name but he must have. "Fun?" he asks, slurring the word.

"That's right," she purrs. "Come outside with me?"

Derek's never picked up a woman in a bar before, has never actually kissed one, but he doesn't think this is how it usually goes. Kate pulls him through the door and around the corner, into a damp alley so narrow there's barely enough room for her to drop to her knees. She manages, though.

"God, what—what are you—?"

"Oh, baby," she chuckles, "You look like you could use so much more than a drinking lesson," and palms his dick through his jeans, hard. He groans, hips stuttering forward into her hand as the other slides up his inseam, fingers catching the hem of his shirt and dragging it up, baring the vulnerable stretch of his stomach.

Showing belly is dangerous for wolves, and submissive. Derek holds back an instinctual flinch, has a second to think, _No, she's human,_ before Kate sinks her teeth into the softer flesh just below his navel. She seems to take his high yelp as a compliment.

She opens the button on his pants with her tongue, and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. They flutter around her hair uncertainly until she rolls her eyes up to his and twists his fingers in hers, pinning his hands back against the rough brick wall behind him.

It's— sloppy, like this, nothing but her mouth, the white flash of her teeth and the slick, obscenely hot curl of her tongue around the base of him while he's still trapped in his underwear, sliding wet and unbearably slow along the shaft when she's worked him free. And it's good, so good, Derek's head falling back against the wall even as his body pulls tight.

"Kate," he tries, feeling the press of the wolf like fur rubbing all along his insides. "Stop, I'm gonna—"

"I don't mind," she says, before her lips slip over the head of his cock and down, down, down, and after that there is no protest, only low, needy sounds and the occasional gasping " _Please_."

Derek comes like it's been punched out of him and knows he's shifted when everything goes grey and bright, Kate's face crystal clear as she pulls off him, tugs her fingers free so she can fist a hand in his hair and angle his face up to the moonlight.

"I was wondering when it'd come out to play," she grins, and her voice is throaty and rough from him, and that hits him almost as hard as her words.

She kisses him then, fucks into his stunned-open mouth with her tongue slotted between his fangs, and Derek doesn't know what's happening anymore. It's hard to panic, hard to feel anything at all but the way her body moves against his, the smell of her arousal so strong he can taste it.

"You got a place?" she husks against his lips, nails scratching through the fur where its sprouted along his jaw.

Derek thinks of his motel room, the one no one's supposed to know about, the musty sheets and lumpy mattress that have been his bed for the past three weeks. "It's not much, but— _ah_ ," he gasps as she grinds her hips into his.

Kate smiles into his neck, and breaths out, "We can take my car."

* * *

Two days later, Derek wakes up to the shrill ringing of the phone where it still lies in pieces on the floor.

" _You don't know me,"_ the voice on the other end says, when Derek has gingerly picked up the cracked receiver. _"But I'm a friend of your mother's. Pack what you can't leave behind and be waiting in front of the motel in twenty minutes."_

"Wait, what?" Derek says, crouched next the bed. His pulse is suddenly beating hard enough to make his voice catch.

" _The pack has ruled against you, and you need to get out of there. Twenty minutes. Be waiting."_

Derek listens to the click, then the dial tone as Kate stretches into wakefulness beside him.

"I need to go," he tells her, and she sits up, comforter falling away from her bare breasts.

"Where?" she asks, hand coming down to splay lazily over his chest.

"I don't know," he confesses, and she frowns sleepily at him, confusion a little line between her eyebrows.

He reaches for the top of the bedside table, where there's a pen and pad of paper. "If you need to reach me," he starts, and has to stop and swallow. He thinks, for a crazy moment, of asking her to run with him.

But why would she? They barely know each other. Hell, he doesn't even know her last name.

"If you need to reach me," he says again, "someone at this number will know how." He writes it out, rips the sheet off the pad and hands it to her; it's his parents' house, because he doesn't have anything else to give her.

Kate takes the number, turning it in idly her fingers.

"I'm sorry," he says, looking up at her. Her hair is a tangled mess, lips bruised and swollen like overripe fruit. She's beautiful.

"Sorry?" she asks, with a little laugh. She threads her fingers through his hair, tipping his head back so she can lay a brief, dry kiss on his forehead. "For what?" On his lips. "Sweetie, you gave me _exactly_ what I wanted."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I may have done something silly.
> 
>  
> 
> [ ](http://teenwolfholidayexchange.tumblr.com/)
> 
>  
> 
> I'm modding an exchange based on tumblr, for those who prefer not to use livejournal or dreamwidth. Participants can create **fic, art, vids**  or **fanmixes/** **playlists**  to share, so everyone, no matter what you are or aren’t good at, is welcome! Even if you don't intend to participate or have already committed to an exchange elsewhere, pimping is so very appreciated. 


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